Abstract: “Achieving fairness in peer to peer (P2P) file sharing require user’s contribution of bandwidth resource that is peer’s download bandwidth is equal to the upload bandwidth it contributes to the system. BitTorrent,a popular file sharing employs a “tit-for tat” (TFT) peer selection strategy to guarantee fairness, whereby a peer chooses to upload to a small set of neighboring peers that providing it with the best download rates. However, despite of BitTorrent achieves excellent utilization of upload capacity, many measurement and simulating studies found its fairness are less impressive where it lack of incentive for a peer to contribute and not effective enough to penalize free riders.This paper presents a literature survey of recent works of fairness improvement including free riders prevention in BitTorrent swarm through its TFT peer selection towards better downloading times and improve system stability.”

Keywords: BitTorrent, fairness, free riders, peer to peer file sharing ,swarm